Bill Frezza is a 35-year veteran of the technology industry. After graduating from MIT with degrees in both science and engineering, Bill spent his early years at Bell Laboratories. Since then, he has worked as a product manager, salesman, marketer, entrepreneur, consultant, technology evangelist, and venture capitalist. Bill holds seven patents and has been investing in early-stage tech startups for the last 17 years as a partner in a venture capital firm. Since 2008, he has been writing weekly opinion columns for publications such as RealClearMarkets.com, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post and Bio-IT World and appeared regularly on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and WBAL. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Hoiles Prize for excellence in American journalism and in October 2013, he became the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2013-2014 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow. In January 2014, Bill began hosting RealClear Radio Hour airing Saturdays on Boston’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.

Governor Walker's Victory Spells Doom For Public Sector Unions

Public sector unions have reached their high water mark. Let the cleanup begin as the red ink recedes.

Despite a last-minute smear campaign accusing Scott Walker of fathering an illegitimate love child, the governor’s recall election victory sends a clear message that should resonate around the nation: The fiscal cancer devouring state budgets has a cure, and he has found it. The costly defeat for the entrenched union interests that tried to oust Walker in retribution for challenging their power was marked by President Obama’s refusal to lend his weight to the campaign for fear of being stained by defeat. We’ll see how well this strategy of opportunistic detachment serves in the fall as Obama reaches out to unions for support.

This fight is not without precedent. Progressive patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who more than any other president set our country on a course away from the founding principles of limited government—knew that public sector unions would be the death of the social welfare state he worked so hard to create. Hence, he consistently opposed allowing government employees to unionize. Today, Greece sets the example of what happens when public sector unions gain the upper hand.

In 1959 Wisconsin became the first state to allow collective bargaining by government employees. The projected cost of supporting Baby Boomer union retirees now threatens to bankrupt the state, as it does many others. Scott Walker ran for office promising change. The fiscal medicine he is administering may be bitter, but it looks like it is starting to work. The state budget has been balanced. The unemployment rate has been dropping and is now below the national average. Property taxes are down. Fraudulent sick leave policies—which allowed employees to call in sick and then work the next shift for overtime pay—have been ended. The government has stopped forcibly collecting union dues from workers’ paychecks.

Best of all, the myth that union bosses represent their members’ interests has been exposed as a lie. Now that union dues are voluntary, tens of thousands of union members have stopped paying them. Membership in the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union (AFSCME) has dropped by half. Membership in the state’s American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is down by over a third. Given unions’ influential role in most elections, the national implications of this trend are staggering.

Walker’s message is clear: The key to bringing balance back to public sector labor relations and balance state budgets is to break the iron triangle of closed-shop mandatory unionization, compulsory dues collection, and oversized campaign donations to politicians that promise to do the unions’ bidding. If other governors take his cue and take up the cause, that giant sucking sound you hear will be the air coming out of union bosses’ bloated political action budgets.

The work in Wisconsin is not complete. The controversial law exempted police and firefighters, a political concession to get the legislation passed. Federal courts have zeroed in on this anomaly, striking down certain sections of the law because they do not treat workers equally. This needs to be repaired— by rescinding the exemption for public safety workers. With the recall election behind him, Walker may be sufficiently emboldened to do just that.

The power of private sector unions was long ago broken by many heavily unionized companies going bankrupt. While this was painful for both workers and shareholders, the economy motored on as nimbler non-union competitors picked up the slack. This approach is problematic for the public sector because bankrupt state and local governments cannot be replaced by competitors waiting in the wings. Yes, citizens can always vote with their feet, emptying out cities like Detroit, leaving the blighted wreckage behind. But isn’t Walker’s targeted fiscal retrenchment less painful than scorched-earth abandonment?

Chicago machine candidate Barack Obama rode into office to the tune of Hail to the Chief, promising the unions that backed him the gift of card check elections, ending the secret ballot that shields employees from union intimidation. He may well ride into retirement to the tune of On Wisconsin as the era of closed shop unionism comes to an end.

Bill Frezza is a Boston-based writer and venture capitalist. You can find all of his columns, TV, and radio interviews here. If you would like to have his columns delivered to you by email, click here or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza.

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This is hardly “doom.” As I understand, all that is lost to public unions in WI is the ability to bargain for benefits–salaries are the same, they still get raises–and can bargain for compensation issues–and still have benefits that will cost them slightly more. Pretty good deal, IMO

Our constitutional republic chooses political leaders democratically based primarily on their political philosophy such as conservatism or liberalism. If public sector unions primarily support liberalism and the citizens vote in a conservative candidate, does not the new governing body have a major barrier in the liberal culture that defines the established bureaucracy? Could this be why early presidencies fired everyone from the previous administration? Could not the liberal bureaucracy be more loyal to a political philosophy the voters did not want in power making it more difficult for the chosen political philosophy to take root? For these reasons, I do not believe public sector unions can be deemed constitutional.

Democracy won last night! There are real people out there who believe in our country again. I slept better last night than any night since the president was electer. Our Republis may survive after all even with the socialists in Washington. They will be gone in 5 months.

Romney needs to tap Paul Ryan for VP and task him with putting his ideas into effect. Maybe they can reverse this God awful path we have been on for the last 3.5 years. Ryan is also right that the Senate should be fired. Term limit of one for all future politicians. Maybe then we will get some who care about the country and will take proper care of it.

Let’s hope that we can break the back of every union in this country. Unions have become nothing more, and nothing less than hotbeds of Communism in it’s rawest form. “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Couldn’t be clearer. They have served their purpose to eliminate child labor abuses at the turn of the 20th century. For that, they should’ve been commended…a LONG TIME AGO. Now, they’ve only become a parasite that sucks the life from this country on EVERY level. Let them die the death they now so richly deserve.

YEEEEE HAWWWW! Could the Wisconsin so-called re-election results be the beginning of the END of the cancerous scourge of big union thuggery and their multi-faceted mafioso-style multi-faceted corruption, including forcing their members to join their criminal organizations and then using the members hard-earned money for political payoffs and giving the union bosses over-the-top salaries and lavish vacations?

In the beginning, unions were perhaps necessary but now one of the evils of our society!

I am retired from Department of Defense. That’s right, a government employee. Although there was a union at the R&D lab where I worked, I chose not to join. So I was not unionized. For 36 years I paid, every pay day, into my retirement plan. And also every two weeks for 36 years, I paid into my health care plan. I had zero problem with that, in fact, I was glad I had plans to pay into. Now that I am retired, I still pay every month into my health care plan. So my question is, why cant other public employees do the same?